Finding beds in flat country. Dan is right.

[Bigb]

Good to hear your finding some good spots in Illinois. I think we have hunted the same spots in the past (Not for deer anymore, I hunt farther south now). Anytime you can find a buck in the area Jon is hunting in your doing really good. Heavily hunted is an understatement. Did you do any good on public land in NE Illinois this year?

[gjs4]

Great info here and my experiences mirror your/Dan's findings with regard to small rises. Any depressions are also preferred travel routes unless more ample cover is available to work the wind.

This bedding is the majority of what I hunt. I have noted a few aspects of variability worth adding. Wind may have subtle or rather substantial changes on bedding. A recluse buck may move from one bedding area to another for the obvious food and pressure reasons but I have watched them leave patch of dogwood when it receives browse pressure from other deer or becomes a bedding area to them. Perhaps the best way to summarize my findings is: a buck's overall bedding nature in flat country seems to be with lesser loyalty to a certain bed than areas with more defined topography. Have has anyone else had similar experiences?

[Troutking]

Awesome Post, thanks for sharing.

[Singing Bridge]

Here is a topo of my favorite river bottom stretch. It has alot of 1'-4' evaluation changes mainly dry creek beds & man made oil well rds, but nothing really shows on topo. This area is about 2miles long by 2miles wide.


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Although it is very flat and without significant changes in elevation, I see a number of transition lines (change in cover) on the topo here. An aerial photo of your area may also help... The creek that dumps into the river has a lot of twists and turns, and the transition it creates may produce buck bedding and travel. The same thing goes for the edge of the swamp I see on the topo. I would walk those edges looking for bedding ( I hunt swamp / swamp edges all the time and my areas are much more featureless than what we have here or what jonsimoneau has put up... no 5' donuts to scout!)

[Singing Bridge]

So, what would a Beast want to look for when scouting featurless transition lines or large areas of homogenous cover when the best of topo's show no significant change... no five foot elevation (or 2 foot elevation) change? Lets take a look at exactly what I mean:

Featurless transition lines is referring to walking the edge of a change in cover that has no points / fingers / bowls associated with it- perhaps because of your property size restrictions or because on public it covers very long distances...

Homogenous cover is what jonsimoneau is speaking of... huge blocks of similar habitat with no "edge" in cover types or "change" in elevation (he found a few 5' donuts, the size of his garage, but what about when there aren't any?).

Think back to Dan in the marsh bucks video, "I can assume that there is bedding under that big willow because a tree that big has to have a lot of ground to support it...".

Any light bulbs going off yet?

The bigges / oldest / trees in any area, towering above the others, whether they are surrounded by cattails / located along a featureless transition / inside a very homogenous area... contain characteristics that attract buck bedding. These old and very large trees have root systems that around the base of the tree stick up 6 to 18 inches above all of the surrounding land. The root systems are covered with hard packed dirt, and this tiny bit of elevation is VERY ATTRACTIVE TO BUCK BEDDING when available. The buck is bedded in an elevated position and I find buck beds at those locations in these situations quite often. In addition to the largest / oldest trees, you want to watch for trees that have blown down in these same areas as they also attract buck bedding. Whether the tree toppled due to age / lightning strike / wind they are worth checking for bedding.

These types of trees I am speaking of are easier to locate along a featureless transition line than in a truly homogenous area, as you can simply walk the transition line looking for them. In homogenous areas, a quality aerial photo may give them away, but otherwise it is time to scout.

mah two pennies

[cbigbear]

SB here is the aerial view. The white is access rds. The west rd is gated right at the top the pic & the circle is the parking area for the east rd. The yellow is property boundary & red square is 3 yr old cutover - now 8' tall briars. The blue is a flooded tupelo bottom & green is one of the briar patches. The east/west creek shown on the topo has water in some spots but mostly dry yr around. The swamp on the topo holds water in the winter only. The entire area South of the east/west running creek is mature hardwoods that very slowly transition to cypress/gum the closer you get to the river. Everything to the N was logged 30 yrs ago mainly small trees with scattered briar patches & small vine tangles.

My hunting & scouting in this area has found the does to bed in the briar patches. I haven't spent much time beast scouting in here & have yet to locate any buck beds. I know mature deer are in the area as a buddy killed a 164" 6yr old 10 1/2 mile up river.

[dan]

It would be nice to zoom into that aerial and change the aerial image dates, however without even doing that I can see very distinct transition lines of differing cover. Along those edges is where your most likely to find buck beds.

[seeds]

This past spring (right after Dan's workshop) I spent days struggling thru several different heavily-pressured public marshes. Cattails,redbrush,scrub willows. I had aerial photos and maps. I also climbed the tallest trees I could find trees along edges with binocs and aerial photos....

..Marshes where there were almost no "real" trees. What I found in several different marshes was that EVERY SINGLE PLACE where there was a tree,there was a bed. If there was a line of sporadic trees buck beds were at the end of the line,doe beds closer to the marsh edge.

Wet meadows? Look out and see a little patch of something "different" - maybe a patch of goldenrod among the sedges.. Topo shows all flat....Walk out and sometimes the ground is only inches higher than the surrounding marsh,but it's dry. Beds.

Any place people have been poking around the marsh...Utility poles?...they dug a hole to put the post in and put that soil somewhere. There's a little high spot with a bed.

Of course not all those beds are used every day - and not all are buck beds - but in some marshes I found EVERY ONE of those tiny little barely-higher spots held a bed. EVERY-FREAKIN' ONE.

I suppose I should qualify that this was in marshes where slightly higher spots were somewhat rare. You could look out and easily count spots worth a look.

[jonsimoneau]

Hey guys. I hunted the three best humps a few times earlier so as not to pressure them too much. I did have some luck as well as some bad luck. One evening a 150 inch 5x5 came out of the best hump and gave me a picture perfect shot. I hit the buck exactly where I wanted too, but something went wrong. Not sure exactly what but I hit him right where I wanted. I spent two days looking for him and even enlisted a guy with a tracking dog. We came up short. The buck went a LONG ways so even though I hit him right where I wanted, for whatever reason I did not get both lungs. It was a heartbreaker for sure, as I have not lost a deer in a long while. But it did give me the confidence in these spots. So I have not been back to any of the 3 humps since the buck incident but I will probably give them all one more hunt soon and hope for some late season action.

[jonsimoneau]

Also, I have identified many more of these humps in otherwise featureless cover that you can bet I will be scounting heavily this February/March.

[Jackson Marsh]

Thanks for the update! Exciting when it comes together like that!

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[kurt]

This is a good read

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[kenn1320]

So these humps only had single buck beds in the snow? I find smaller humps in flat farm land like size of a car hood about 1.5ft hump and they bed on them. I also find beds on flat ground in not so obvious spots. Yes the snow is a for sure thing, but your looking post season on public land which likely means few deer. I'd bet there are lots of beds in the area, but you likely found the preferred bedding and a 150" buck kinda confirms that. Lol Do you recall if they J hooked into those beds? Also curious, were the beds facing the parking area, or direction you walked to them?

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[gjs4]

On Singing Bridges point- think it was Dan or Vale who wrote if you grab aerials from a bunch of different years the oldest trees/hedgerows will give you info on bedding and travel of mature deer

[jonsimoneau]

Kenn1320, none of these humps only had one bed on it. They all had multiple beds. To be honest I did not know for sure if they were doe beds or buck beds. Because this area is nothing but honeysuckle and mature oaks, I rarely find any rubs. The beds were all overlooking the "steepest" part of the humps so they varied in the direction they were facing. The hump that the buck came off of always consistently had a large bed in the same spot so all I could do was assume it was a buck bed. As far as the J hook thing, I don't really know. I only hunted these bedding areas on evening hunts. No doubt there are likely many more beds in the area. I just tried to use these three as a little experiment. This winter I will investigate all the other potential bedding areas as well. This particular piece of ground is very difficult to hunt because it is overrun with hunters and has very few deer. But it's close to my home so I try to make the best of it. Now that I know the areas that the deer bed in, I can now scout it with more of a purpose rather than just randomly walking around the woods hoping to find that "magic spot".

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